For each element, there is a small list of stable isotopes. If a nucleus becomes unstable for whatever reason, it attempts to return to a stable configuration. There are several ways this can happen, including radioactive decay and fission.
The nucleus of any atom is held together by binding energy, and tries to fly apart due to electric repulsion between the protons. The binding energy per nucleon has a broad maximum around 8 MeV and nuclear mass between 50 - 75. Unstable, heavier nuclei may undergo fission into smaller nuclei with higher binding energy. The difference is released as heat, which we use to generate power.
The electric repulsion increases as the square of the number of protons in a nucleus, so more neutrons per proton are needed for heavier elements to maintain stability; however, there is a limit, and elements beyond Bismuth (83) are naturally unstable. These nuclei undergo radioactive decay, which occurs in two types: alpha and beta.
Unstable, heavy nuclei emit alpha particles, which are identical to Helium nuclei -- two protons, two neutrons. This radiation reduces the atomic mass by roughly four, eventually bringing the element to a stable nucleon count. Unstable nuclei also can undergo beta decay, converting a neutron into a proton and a high-energy electron, which is emitted. The amount of time needed for half of a sample of material to radioactively decay is called the half-life.
For fission, there are only three isotopes with a long-enough radioactive half-life to be stored and transported, and which are fissionable by neutrons of all energies: Uranium-233, Uranium-235, and Plutonium-239. U-233 isn't natural, and is created by inducing Thorium-232 to undergo beta decay by adding a neutron. U-235 occurs in small but extractable quantities in natural Uranium ore. Pu-239 is created by U-238 neutron capture and beta decay.
Alpha- and beta decay cause ionization in matter with which they come in contact by knocking off outer-shell electrons. Alpha radiation for Pu-239, the most energetic alpha decayer in a reactor at 5.1 MeV, has a range of only 3.6 cm in air, after which it is low-enough energy to absorb two electrons from the air and become a Helium atom which can't ionize. Uranium reactors, like the Toshiba model, have even smaller alpha ranges. Nuclear reactors are not at risk for leaking alpha radiation.
Beta radiation consists of electrons, which are much more likely to scatter when they ionize, so there isn't a specific ionization range for beta radiation. On the other hand, the highest energy beta radiation from fission reactions is on the order of 3 MeV, and can be stopped by half a centimeter of concrete. There is no possibility of beta radiation escaping nuclear reactors.
Gamma radiation, produced by neutron capture reactions, drops off exponentially as it is absorbed, so it can be reduced to background levels by a manageable thickness of iron or lead shielding. Normally, this occurs immediately surrounding the reactor vessel itself. If the vessel develops a leak or the shielding fails, nuclear plants have additional concrete shielding and containment procedures. In the unlikely event that everything fails, exposure to reactor gamma radiation is comparable to going to a doctor for X-rays -- not something you'd want for prolonged periods, but not going to injure you before you evacuate. In the case of the Toshiba reactor, which is 60 feet underground, there is no possibility of gamma leakage because the ground acts as shielding.
Halving the period to sell X songs shows that demand has doubled. Assuming that Mac user demand has remained constant, if you subtract them out, that means there are as many people downloading songs using Windows as there are using Macs.
This kind of thinking reminds me of this old 50's or 60's horror flick where they hooked up all the computers of the world and the computers "magically" became a sentient being which subsequently tried to take over the world.
Are you thinking of Colossus: The Forbin Project? It was just on TCM a few days ago. Interesting movie, go check it out. Beware, the ending is bizarre.
The Israeli government is just holding out in order to get a better deal on MS products for the upcoming years.
Sorry, but this is paranoid speculation. If you're negotiating with someone, and there's a chance you can reach a settlement, you don't set arbitrary punitive deadlines in the distant future. Suppose MSFT offered Israel free software upgrades until the end of time, everything that you have supposed they want. How does announcing now that they're cutting off contracts until the end of '04 help Israel's bargaining position? It kinda shafts them, doesn't it?
Nope, this one is past negotiating, folks. Israel has clearly had enough. They've decided MSFT is a monopoly, and they're gonna see justice done. And who said anything about upgrading to Linux? There are plenty of alternatives out there. And who said anything about upgrading at all? How many people do you know who still run Windows 95, or Linux 0.99, or AIX, because it works?
Let's not be unnecessarily self-recriminatory. We scored a big one here, let's celebrate.
Sorry, have to disagree, at least in part. We're already paying an ISP to carry our traffic over their medium. They don't care if that traffic happens to be VoIP, nor should they. You don't have to pay extra to your ISP to fire up an AIM voice connection, or to connect to a NetMeeting server, or to play an FPS game for that matter.
In other words, we're already paying the piper. There will always be gratis VoIP, as long as there's an RFC and a competent coder somewhere in the world.
If RFG can show that more than $5000 worth of damage was done to his computers or business, he can get the FBI involved. If they can track down who did this, there could be jail time for some of these bastards.
(if the bill passes the Senate and gets signed into law) is that no state may tax you for Internet access. This bill basically says that such a tax would be financially discriminatory, since apparently a tax on access would deprive some Americans of the ability to use a common communications medium. I guess the 'Net has finally hit the mainstream.
What this bill isn't, is a moratorium on taxation of Internet services (such as long distance/VoIP, catalog/retail shopping, web hosting, etc). The House have only said that no state may tax access to these services.
I am not misinformed about the law. I choose to break it, because it is unjust. I learned the lessons of the rights movements of the 1910's and the 1960's. Following the RIAA's logic, neither women nor blacks should have the right to vote. Whites had derogatory words for black people, just as the RIAA and MPAA now have derogatory words for copyright infringers. Those groups were and are wrong, and shame on them for resorting to name-calling.
The point isn't that I'm breaking the law -- I know it, you know it, everyone knows it. The point is that the law is wrong, and I will fight it any way I know how.
Trade secret controls are a privilegde. Free speech is a right.
While normally I would agree with you, Captain Obvious, there are other arguments to be made here. Taking the devil's advocate position here, what about property rights? Americans have, in the same document that gives us free speech rights, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects. Considering that some people believe that inanimate constructs can have the same qualities as tangible goods, there is this thing called "intellectual property". According to a certain logic and interpretation, this 'property' is protected under the Fourth Amendment, and not subject to revocation or seizure. When someone goes out of their way to 'protect' this 'private property' (a la Trade Secret laws), and someone else 'steals' it (DVD Jon et al), they may consider themselves in possession of the Moral High Ground going after the 'thieves'.
Sorry, your gambit didn't work. According to the EFF:
Miller's Paradox: As a network evolves, the number of Nazi comparisons not forestalled by
citation to Godwin's Law converges to zero.
By quoting Miller's Paradox, I have made the requisite Nazi reference mentioned by the paradox, hence fulfilling prophesy and nullifying the usefulness of this thread. I hereby declare this entire thread over, Quirk's Exception be damned.
Sorry, you're wrong. Electronic distribution of mp3s you don't own is a criminal offense, according to 17 USC 506(a)(2). Punishments are located in 18 USC 2319. You can get serious jail time, and if you're convicted of a felony, you lose your right to vote in some states. Imagine that, you lose the greatest priviledge Western society ever came up with because you shared Britney Spears with two of your friends.
This is 30 year old code people. Is it even still covered by copyright at all?
According to laws pushed through Congress by the recording and movie industries (17 USC 302-303), the code is protected for 95 years from first date of publication, or somewhere around 2068.
Re:Excellent heat conductivity
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
it's how much debt you're willing to incurr to show your love.
I'll probably draw a lot of flames for this post, since it's troll food even though I really feel this way, but I've been bottling this up for a long time and I need to rant:).
The attitude that many people have in regards to engagement rings really amazes me. Yes, both men and women. I'd never fall in love with someone who thought I had to bankrupt myself to 'prove' my love. If I wanted that kind of love, 'love' in exchange for money, I'd shack up with a whore. I'd rather spend those thousands of dollars taking my beloved backpacking in northern Vietnam or surfing in Malaysia, building relationship-reinforcing memories that will last a lifetime.
Memories, unlike rocks, can't be bought from some merchant, they have to be earned through action and experience. Sharing those memories with someone you love can't be owned by anyone else -- they're unique to you, unlike a rock. They can't be lost, or destroyed, you don't have to insure them, and they prove your love much more than any diamond. They prove that you want to give your loved one something fragile and unrecoverable and unique -- your time. Time is infinitely more valuable than money.
Yes, you don't have some big honkin' shiny thing you get to brag about to people for whom bragging is the most important thing in life. Big deal. What you do have is something that makes you a better person, and if other people think less of you for that, then they're not good enough for you anyway.
Let's start with navigation. They may be ex-NASA, but unless they applied for and received GPS PPS capability, they're navigating with SPS only, which is only +/- 100m with 95% confidence. Normal flight rules allow human pilots to use GPS for lat/lon determination only and not altitude, especially not for precision approaches. 50m +/- 100m isn't what you want to see on your altimeter. Normally, GPS should be backed up by something like LORAN, which has accuracy of 100ft, but even that isn't reliable over much of the North Atlantic due to poor coverage. The best system involves the use of GPS/LORAN-C in combination with some sort of inertial navigation system (INS). But you have to remember that gyroscopes precess, and that magnetic headings can be off by as much as 45 degrees in the North Atlantic due to magnetic deviation.
Realize that even as reliable as GPS is, satellites can give false information. There's a system to counteract this problem, called RAIM, but it requires 4 birds to be visible to detect a problem, and 5 to remove the faulty signal from nav calculations, assuming you have a redundant, GPS-compatible, digital barometric altimeter on board. Otherwise, you need 6 birds visible.
Guidance seems to be relatively straightforward: figure out where you are (with 95% confidence), and aim toward your next waypoint. Here's a quick overview of what that entails:
Determine lat/lon for you and the waypoint
Determine true (ground) course
Determine magnetic course after correcting for the aforementioned deviation
Determine magnetic heading after correcting for wind
Determine compass heading after correcting for onboard instrument magnetic interference
Issue commands to the flight control system to head that way
The wind correction is non-trivial. Last I checked, winds in the flight route were generally sustained at around 15 knots, and varied by a full 180 degrees relative to the course. This plane flies at about 40 knots. Grabbing a calculator and doing some trig, wind correction could be as much as arctan(15/40) = 20 degrees. Onboard interference is typically up to 10 degrees in GA aircraft. Here's a concrete example: if you want to fly due east (090) in the North Atlantic with a 45 degree deviation and winds from the south at 15 knots, with onboard interference of +10 degrees, you'd have to fly a compass heading of 165! That's almost due south.
That leaves flight controls. You need to maintain proper attitude, keeping in mind that there's gonna be turbulence. In order for any magnetic navigation system to properly realigned (remember gyroscopic precession?), you need to be flying straight and level, which requires extensive compensation for unsteady flight dynamics. It's not as simple as saying "pitch up" when your speed gets too high or your altitude is too low. What if you get inverted? It can happen. Even human pilots don't do so well flying instruments only -- see the NTSB findings in the JFK junior crash. Maintaining stability and control over dynamical systems is a hard problem, which is why many colleges offer entire majors in CDS.
Disclaimer: I am a Space Shuttle enthusiast and a student pilot (hopefully, that will change in two weeks). I know that NASA have the expertise to overcome these problems, and I'm willing to give these engineers the benefit of the doubt. I wish them good weather and no system malfunctions.
Dear Mr. Anonymous Coward:
You stole my software. You know, when you got that all-in-one utilities disk for Windows free from that guy on the corner. No, I'm not going to tell you which app I wrote. Pay me $699 for each copy of Windows you own.
Love,
Non-anonymous, non-coward
P.S. Baseless accusations of IP infringement remain baseless until someone comes forward with proof, one way or the other. When the accuser is unwilling to do so, they deserve all the attention they get, which should be precisely zero. If and when SCO start naming files and line numbers, then let's discuss damages.
Having read the article, I attempted a score on the crank science scale. Unfortunately, this article ranks up there pretty highly. The problem is that his article doesn't present his theory in a coherent, logical manner. Much of the paper is circular rhetoric, and the paper's undue length can be attributed to this shortcoming.
That having been said, I think the theory has merit. It basically says that the universe is inherently fuzzy, in the sense that all measurements are approximations, and hence not discrete. This last is the big sticking point, since quantum mechanical calculations rely basically on projecting a vector in a "state space" onto a particular axis and seeing what value comes out. If the axes are 'fuzzy', it becomes much harder to do the math. In fact, this theory would require the addition of a 'measurement scale' to pretty much every equation and variable in physics! This isn't a conceptual problem for most physicists, but it's a royal headache, and doesn't really give more accurate results for 99% of the problems out there. The only thing this theory might be useful for is our conceptual understanding. It's not going to change the nuts-and-bolts of physical calculation.
Disclaimer: IANAP, but I did take two years of physics at Feynman's university, one quarter of which was from Kip Thorne.
SCO will no doubt argue that, at the time, they didn't realise the source contained their copyrighted material.
If SCO added code to the Linux kernel or GNU environment without distributing it, fine. If they released their changes, voluntarily or no, then according to the terms of the GPL paragraph 2(b), the modified work must be licensed under the GPL also. The GPL is quite explicit about this requirement: SCO are unable to distribute (non-SCO) Linux or GNU sources under any other copyright license. Any attempt to do so would violate paragraph 5, and make SCO liable to a criminal infringement lawsuit from the FSF.
[theory] The reason we haven't seen such a suit yet is that the FSF realize the ramifications of the above paragraph, and believe that SCO has already forfeited copyright 'protection' by distributing GNU/Linux. The FSF don't have to spend money to do anything about it, since IBM's own lawyers will raise this point in court anyway. [/theory]
This raises the question of whether you can be legally bound by the GPL if you don't realise what you were licensing.
In the US at least, ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it. And in any case, SCO seem to have IP lawyers crawling out of the woodwork. It seems reasonable that they'd at least bother to have one of them read the copyright on works they're copying for the purpose of commercial distribution. Not to do so would be like me saying "I'm going to tape football games and add a few 3D special effects, then I'm going to replay them in public areas, and charge admission" and then pretending not to know I need written permission from the NFL and the home team.
Sorry, small claims courts don't set official legal precedent. I'd give you a link, but one doesn't seem to be readily available from an official legal document site. Just google for "small claims court" and "legal precedent" and you'll get the picture.
Slashdot Mirror
For each element, there is a small list of stable isotopes. If a nucleus becomes unstable for whatever reason, it attempts to return to a stable configuration. There are several ways this can happen, including radioactive decay and fission.
The nucleus of any atom is held together by binding energy, and tries to fly apart due to electric repulsion between the protons. The binding energy per nucleon has a broad maximum around 8 MeV and nuclear mass between 50 - 75. Unstable, heavier nuclei may undergo fission into smaller nuclei with higher binding energy. The difference is released as heat, which we use to generate power.
The electric repulsion increases as the square of the number of protons in a nucleus, so more neutrons per proton are needed for heavier elements to maintain stability; however, there is a limit, and elements beyond Bismuth (83) are naturally unstable. These nuclei undergo radioactive decay, which occurs in two types: alpha and beta.
Unstable, heavy nuclei emit alpha particles, which are identical to Helium nuclei -- two protons, two neutrons. This radiation reduces the atomic mass by roughly four, eventually bringing the element to a stable nucleon count. Unstable nuclei also can undergo beta decay, converting a neutron into a proton and a high-energy electron, which is emitted. The amount of time needed for half of a sample of material to radioactively decay is called the half-life.
For fission, there are only three isotopes with a long-enough radioactive half-life to be stored and transported, and which are fissionable by neutrons of all energies: Uranium-233, Uranium-235, and Plutonium-239. U-233 isn't natural, and is created by inducing Thorium-232 to undergo beta decay by adding a neutron. U-235 occurs in small but extractable quantities in natural Uranium ore. Pu-239 is created by U-238 neutron capture and beta decay.
Alpha- and beta decay cause ionization in matter with which they come in contact by knocking off outer-shell electrons. Alpha radiation for Pu-239, the most energetic alpha decayer in a reactor at 5.1 MeV, has a range of only 3.6 cm in air, after which it is low-enough energy to absorb two electrons from the air and become a Helium atom which can't ionize. Uranium reactors, like the Toshiba model, have even smaller alpha ranges. Nuclear reactors are not at risk for leaking alpha radiation.
Beta radiation consists of electrons, which are much more likely to scatter when they ionize, so there isn't a specific ionization range for beta radiation. On the other hand, the highest energy beta radiation from fission reactions is on the order of 3 MeV, and can be stopped by half a centimeter of concrete. There is no possibility of beta radiation escaping nuclear reactors.
Gamma radiation, produced by neutron capture reactions, drops off exponentially as it is absorbed, so it can be reduced to background levels by a manageable thickness of iron or lead shielding. Normally, this occurs immediately surrounding the reactor vessel itself. If the vessel develops a leak or the shielding fails, nuclear plants have additional concrete shielding and containment procedures. In the unlikely event that everything fails, exposure to reactor gamma radiation is comparable to going to a doctor for X-rays -- not something you'd want for prolonged periods, but not going to injure you before you evacuate. In the case of the Toshiba reactor, which is 60 feet underground, there is no possibility of gamma leakage because the ground acts as shielding.
Halving the period to sell X songs shows that demand has doubled. Assuming that Mac user demand has remained constant, if you subtract them out, that means there are as many people downloading songs using Windows as there are using Macs.
Are you thinking of Colossus: The Forbin Project? It was just on TCM a few days ago. Interesting movie, go check it out. Beware, the ending is bizarre.
Sorry, but this is paranoid speculation. If you're negotiating with someone, and there's a chance you can reach a settlement, you don't set arbitrary punitive deadlines in the distant future. Suppose MSFT offered Israel free software upgrades until the end of time, everything that you have supposed they want. How does announcing now that they're cutting off contracts until the end of '04 help Israel's bargaining position? It kinda shafts them, doesn't it?
Nope, this one is past negotiating, folks. Israel has clearly had enough. They've decided MSFT is a monopoly, and they're gonna see justice done. And who said anything about upgrading to Linux? There are plenty of alternatives out there. And who said anything about upgrading at all? How many people do you know who still run Windows 95, or Linux 0.99, or AIX, because it works?
Let's not be unnecessarily self-recriminatory. We scored a big one here, let's celebrate.
In other words, we're already paying the piper. There will always be gratis VoIP, as long as there's an RFC and a competent coder somewhere in the world.
Here's the authoritative reference on baggy-pantsing.
If RFG can show that more than $5000 worth of damage was done to his computers or business, he can get the FBI involved. If they can track down who did this, there could be jail time for some of these bastards.
What this bill isn't, is a moratorium on taxation of Internet services (such as long distance/VoIP, catalog/retail shopping, web hosting, etc). The House have only said that no state may tax access to these services.
The firm quoted in the article has been accused of giving overblown statistics and buzzword-laden, scare-tactic press releases.
has already been Project Slashdotted.
The point isn't that I'm breaking the law -- I know it, you know it, everyone knows it. The point is that the law is wrong, and I will fight it any way I know how.
It's the year 2003, but where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars. I don't see any flying cars? Why? Why? Why?
For anyone interested in video: Win98 crashes on Bill.
While normally I would agree with you, Captain Obvious, there are other arguments to be made here. Taking the devil's advocate position here, what about property rights? Americans have, in the same document that gives us free speech rights, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects. Considering that some people believe that inanimate constructs can have the same qualities as tangible goods, there is this thing called "intellectual property". According to a certain logic and interpretation, this 'property' is protected under the Fourth Amendment, and not subject to revocation or seizure. When someone goes out of their way to 'protect' this 'private property' (a la Trade Secret laws), and someone else 'steals' it (DVD Jon et al), they may consider themselves in possession of the Moral High Ground going after the 'thieves'.
These bastards must be stopped.
According to laws pushed through Congress by the recording and movie industries (17 USC 302-303), the code is protected for 95 years from first date of publication, or somewhere around 2068.
I'll probably draw a lot of flames for this post, since it's troll food even though I really feel this way, but I've been bottling this up for a long time and I need to rant :).
The attitude that many people have in regards to engagement rings really amazes me. Yes, both men and women. I'd never fall in love with someone who thought I had to bankrupt myself to 'prove' my love. If I wanted that kind of love, 'love' in exchange for money, I'd shack up with a whore. I'd rather spend those thousands of dollars taking my beloved backpacking in northern Vietnam or surfing in Malaysia, building relationship-reinforcing memories that will last a lifetime.
Memories, unlike rocks, can't be bought from some merchant, they have to be earned through action and experience. Sharing those memories with someone you love can't be owned by anyone else -- they're unique to you, unlike a rock. They can't be lost, or destroyed, you don't have to insure them, and they prove your love much more than any diamond. They prove that you want to give your loved one something fragile and unrecoverable and unique -- your time. Time is infinitely more valuable than money.
Yes, you don't have some big honkin' shiny thing you get to brag about to people for whom bragging is the most important thing in life. Big deal. What you do have is something that makes you a better person, and if other people think less of you for that, then they're not good enough for you anyway.
[/rant]
Let the negative mods begin...
Realize that even as reliable as GPS is, satellites can give false information. There's a system to counteract this problem, called RAIM, but it requires 4 birds to be visible to detect a problem, and 5 to remove the faulty signal from nav calculations, assuming you have a redundant, GPS-compatible, digital barometric altimeter on board. Otherwise, you need 6 birds visible.
Guidance seems to be relatively straightforward: figure out where you are (with 95% confidence), and aim toward your next waypoint. Here's a quick overview of what that entails:
- Determine lat/lon for you and the waypoint
- Determine true (ground) course
- Determine magnetic course after correcting for the aforementioned deviation
- Determine magnetic heading after correcting for wind
- Determine compass heading after correcting for onboard instrument magnetic interference
- Issue commands to the flight control system to head that way
The wind correction is non-trivial. Last I checked, winds in the flight route were generally sustained at around 15 knots, and varied by a full 180 degrees relative to the course. This plane flies at about 40 knots. Grabbing a calculator and doing some trig, wind correction could be as much as arctan(15/40) = 20 degrees. Onboard interference is typically up to 10 degrees in GA aircraft. Here's a concrete example: if you want to fly due east (090) in the North Atlantic with a 45 degree deviation and winds from the south at 15 knots, with onboard interference of +10 degrees, you'd have to fly a compass heading of 165! That's almost due south.That leaves flight controls. You need to maintain proper attitude, keeping in mind that there's gonna be turbulence. In order for any magnetic navigation system to properly realigned (remember gyroscopic precession?), you need to be flying straight and level, which requires extensive compensation for unsteady flight dynamics. It's not as simple as saying "pitch up" when your speed gets too high or your altitude is too low. What if you get inverted? It can happen. Even human pilots don't do so well flying instruments only -- see the NTSB findings in the JFK junior crash. Maintaining stability and control over dynamical systems is a hard problem, which is why many colleges offer entire majors in CDS.
Disclaimer: I am a Space Shuttle enthusiast and a student pilot (hopefully, that will change in two weeks). I know that NASA have the expertise to overcome these problems, and I'm willing to give these engineers the benefit of the doubt. I wish them good weather and no system malfunctions.
You stole my software. You know, when you got that all-in-one utilities disk for Windows free from that guy on the corner. No, I'm not going to tell you which app I wrote. Pay me $699 for each copy of Windows you own.
Love,
Non-anonymous, non-coward
P.S. Baseless accusations of IP infringement remain baseless until someone comes forward with proof, one way or the other. When the accuser is unwilling to do so, they deserve all the attention they get, which should be precisely zero. If and when SCO start naming files and line numbers, then let's discuss damages.
That having been said, I think the theory has merit. It basically says that the universe is inherently fuzzy, in the sense that all measurements are approximations, and hence not discrete. This last is the big sticking point, since quantum mechanical calculations rely basically on projecting a vector in a "state space" onto a particular axis and seeing what value comes out. If the axes are 'fuzzy', it becomes much harder to do the math. In fact, this theory would require the addition of a 'measurement scale' to pretty much every equation and variable in physics! This isn't a conceptual problem for most physicists, but it's a royal headache, and doesn't really give more accurate results for 99% of the problems out there. The only thing this theory might be useful for is our conceptual understanding. It's not going to change the nuts-and-bolts of physical calculation.
Disclaimer: IANAP, but I did take two years of physics at Feynman's university, one quarter of which was from Kip Thorne.
If SCO added code to the Linux kernel or GNU environment without distributing it, fine. If they released their changes, voluntarily or no, then according to the terms of the GPL paragraph 2(b), the modified work must be licensed under the GPL also. The GPL is quite explicit about this requirement: SCO are unable to distribute (non-SCO) Linux or GNU sources under any other copyright license. Any attempt to do so would violate paragraph 5, and make SCO liable to a criminal infringement lawsuit from the FSF.
[theory] The reason we haven't seen such a suit yet is that the FSF realize the ramifications of the above paragraph, and believe that SCO has already forfeited copyright 'protection' by distributing GNU/Linux. The FSF don't have to spend money to do anything about it, since IBM's own lawyers will raise this point in court anyway. [/theory]
This raises the question of whether you can be legally bound by the GPL if you don't realise what you were licensing.
In the US at least, ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it. And in any case, SCO seem to have IP lawyers crawling out of the woodwork. It seems reasonable that they'd at least bother to have one of them read the copyright on works they're copying for the purpose of commercial distribution. Not to do so would be like me saying "I'm going to tape football games and add a few 3D special effects, then I'm going to replay them in public areas, and charge admission" and then pretending not to know I need written permission from the NFL and the home team.
Actually, he might be on to something there, given how random many users seem to be.
Sorry, small claims courts don't set official legal precedent. I'd give you a link, but one doesn't seem to be readily available from an official legal document site. Just google for "small claims court" and "legal precedent" and you'll get the picture.